Top 4 GIF Creator Spaces

One of the most popular ways to share content online is through GIFs. Despite the heavily debated pronunciation, GIFs are a great medium that convey emotions, reactions, and an entertainment factor to users. GIFs are created from videos, screen recordings, drawings, and more, and are a great tool to use across the internet.

In this article, we’ll be talking about some of the most popular websites used to make GIFs! Each entry talks about the basic features of each site, and the various hoops you have to jump through to use them.

One of the easiest sources available, Giphy takes the link to a video from Youtube, Vimeo, or Vine, and pulls it up for you. You cut it down to what you wish, anything below 15 seconds, and with a few more clicks it is easy to download and upload your newly created GIF to almost any site. Giphy also lets you add captions, color, and various filters to your GIF. The website also lets users edit GIFs created by other users, and users can share any GIF. Just a note, though: any video you want to use on Giphy.com must be fewer than 15 minutes in length.

And if you’re looking for a way to create GIFs on the go, there is also a mobile app, Giphy Cam, that lets you manipulate GIFs of your own recordings on your phone.

Gif.com is very similar to Giphy, in that you take a link to whatever video you want to pull from and plug it into their website (or you upload your own video). However, Gif.com takes it one step further–once you have the clip you want, there are 13 different categories of effects that you can use to manipulate your GIF. These include features like cropping, adjusting the hue and saturation levels, adding a watermark, and more! Gif.com also differs from Giphy in that there is no limit to how long the video you are pulling from can be.

However, there are some limits to what features you can use. Gif.com has a Premium subscription package for $7.99 a month that lets you delve deeper into some of the features hidden behind a paywall.

Imgflip is another easy-to-use tool! Upload videos from Youtube, Vine, or most other websites, or even from your own files, and then you can use their simple interface to select your clip, add a caption to it, adjust it, and download it to your account when you’re done! You can keep your GIF private if you have your own account, or you can release it to the rest of the site (and internet) for free use! This is also one of the easier sites to use if you want to convert your own images into GIFs.

Imgflip also has some limitations, however. Unless you want to pay for Imgflip Pro, your video will need to be fewer than 70MB and any finished GIF will have a small Imgflip watermark on it and will be fewer than 20 seconds.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking to make a GIF from your own screen, you have a few options! You can record your screen with Skype (easy tutorials can be found here!) or you can download other apps. Screen to GIF has a simple interface that is popular with Windows users, or you can go with RecordIT to record just a part of your screen. Or you can use CloudApp, which also lets you record your screen and create good quality GIFs with a unique URL for each!

This website is very different from the previous two. Instead of taking content from videos that are posted online, “And then I was like…” lets you upload your own videos, cut them down to the appropriate frames, and create your very own reaction GIFs featuring videos taken from your enabled webcam. You have three seconds to record your GIF, and you can add any caption you like.

Photoshop is also another popular tool used to create animated GIFs, so keep an eye out for another article running you through the process!

And keep this in mind: when you’re having trouble making your own GIF, chances are someone else has made it! Sites like GIPHY let you edit and use GIFs that others have created, and GIFs are freely available on social media sites like Twitter and Reddit, where you can search through a collected database of popular (and obscure) GIFs and use them to your heart’s content.